


Too Much

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Hell, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-26 03:53:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6222655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So he wouldn’t steal a car on his own, mostly out of superstition—but Tatsuya would (and Tatsuya makes himself very clear he’s going to hotwire the damn thing anyway whether Shuuzou’s in or not).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Much

The stakes are different here. You can’t die again; you can’t be broken beyond repair—you get sick and you bleed, sometimes, but it always heals; it hurts more and takes longer but you never get too fucked up. You stay a little while somewhere and then you leave, off across the desert for another town exactly like the one you left, another town in an endless sea of them. It’s all transient; you steal a pair of boots and wear them until the soles are run through; you come home too late one day and someone else has taken your makeshift apartment with the broken dishwasher. The laws are all unwritten (and so many people here can’t read, anyway, or they only read dead languages) and they’re less about rights than they are about giving and taking.

Still, Shuuzou probably wouldn’t steal a car on his own. For one, he can’t drive; for another, he’s probably stolen enough. It’s not the larceny counts he’d spent his last years ducking that got him here but the disregard for others’ property, disregard for others’ lives, clinging to the thrill of weaving through traffic on someone else’s motorcycle trying to get away from the cops, scraping the fender on some old businessman’s compact car on his way by, trying to forget how disappointed his parents would be if they could see him. (They’d stopped yelling at him because it wasn’t doing shit; then his father had gotten sick and his mother was never around and then they skipped town with the kids and Shuuzou never saw them again. He’s not even sure the hospital where he died had contacted them, what had happened to his body. It’s probably for the best that they didn’t know, if they still loved him enough for it to hurt.) And that’s what finally killed him, a joyride in the dark on a one-way mountain road, a head-on collision with a truck, flying helmetless into the railing. That’s what killed him and brought him here.

So he wouldn’t steal a car on his own, mostly out of superstition—but Tatsuya would (and Tatsuya makes himself very clear he’s going to hotwire the damn thing anyway whether Shuuzou’s in or not). He’s not really sure what Tatsuya did to get himself here; he’d mentioned being killed in a knife fight but Shuuzou’s not sure if he’s just a violent person or if that was just the top layer of the things he’d done, if he’d been some high-ranking gang member setting out to exploit and destroy. He’s a slippery mess of half-truths, and he knows just how beautiful he is and takes full advantage of it to rope Shuuzou into his scheme (as it is)—steal a car and drive until they can’t go anymore, until they run out of gas and have to walk or get bored and turn around and come back. And the loose ends of the plan, the way it’s not so much a plan as a half-formed idea, make him decide that whatever he is (was) in life, Tatsuya was no criminal mastermind.

They siphon gas out of other people’s tanks, and Shuuzou steals a few cans from the station while Tatsuya flirts with the manager and he kind of can’t believe he’s actually doing this, they’re actually doing this, until they’re out on the road and the town has faded away behind them in the dusty haze. The radio’s dead, and they have only each other and the raspy engine of the car for a soundtrack. That’s okay; Shuuzou would rather just watch the way Tatsuya’s hand moves on the gearshift, the way he looks so natural in the driver’s seat as if he, at all of eighteen or so when he’d died, had been at it for years. (Maybe he had. He’s heard Americans are funny about driving.)

They fuck in the back of the car in the middle of the desert, Shuuzou’s bare feet scraping against the coppery dust on the car’s moldy carpet flooring. Tatsuya’s face flushes; he curls his toes around the back of Shuuzou’s legs. He doesn’t say anything, not even a “yes” or a “faster”; sometimes it seems as if he’s about to but he swallows it and kisses Shuuzou instead, in what might be an attempt to distract himself (or distract Shuuzou, and if that’s the case it kind of works). They do it more as the trip goes on, and Tatsuya’s knuckles are always white on the wheel and the stick and he drives faster than they should be going, even with the empty road. It’s as if he’s trying to get away from something, something inside his head.

And Shuuzou gets it, a little bit. Not really, because he doesn’t know what Tatsuya’s done, what he regrets so much, but Shuuzou’s got enough regrets of his own to recognize them in other people. He still dreams about his father sometimes, his father when he was healthy and before Shuuzou started straying from what he ought to do, before Shuuzou started fighting and stealing and lying. He dreams about his mother, too; he dreams about her disappointment and the way she’d held his younger siblings close to her as if she was afraid the same thing might happen to them, as if she’d already lost Shuuzou to something else—and he supposes she had. And that’s what he regrets the most, not the stealing in and of itself, not all of the laws and statutes he’d broken four times over, but the way things had ended with his parents, the way he hadn’t even attempted to fix them (and he’d had his chances). He wonders if Tatsuya’s got parents who couldn’t bear to see him fight, someone he’d disappointed, fences that couldn’t be mended.

And then Tatsuya gets sick from some bad desert meat (funny how animals die here and they don’t, funny how they don’t need to eat but do so out of habit); he’s dehydrated and gasping for water all afternoon (and they’re always thirsty here; even if you could get enough water to drink for an hour straight it doesn’t sate your thirst, one of those things about this place that you get used to but never really get used to, the permanent parched throats and cracked lips). It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better, but they have the promise of the cooler night ahead of them, hopefully cool enough for Tatsuya to really sleep through the fitfulness of his fever. His forehead is burning, worse than the sand outside at midday; his hands are hot, too, but he’s so out of it he locks his fingers in between Shuuzou’s and Shuuzou doesn’t have the heart to let his hands go.

He wakes them both up with his coughing; Shuuzou’s sprawled out on the folded passenger’s seat with the glove compartment handle digging into his lower back, and Tatsuya’s almost falling off the back seat but manages to steady himself. He looks a little better; his eyes are a little clearer.

“Shuu?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t elaborate, and Shuuzou’s not quite sure what he’s apologizing for—for deciding to do this trip? For goading him into it? Shuuzou’s not mad about that; he never was. He reaches his free hand over to smooth Tatsuya’s hair (his forehead’s cooler; he’s definitely past the worst).

“It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Tatsuya looks as if he wants to cry.

“It’s the mountains,” he says. “They remind me too much of home.”

Shuuzou’s not sure if he’s delirious or not right now (and this is definitely not something he’d say under normal circumstances). He looks out of the window; there’s only a few more montain roads to go from what he can see. He squeezes Tatsuya’s hand, and Tatsuya sighs. He closes his eyes, rolls over, and like a cat he’s right back to sleep.

They start driving the next afternoon, after Tatsuya’s sworn he’s up to it and Shuuzou’s not sure arguing is worth it anymore. Tatsuya glances over at him every so often, and then away, as if he’s afraid Shuuzou will disappear, as if he’s afraid he’s said too much. And he hasn’t said enough, but their time is unlimited and if there’s anything Shuuzou’s learned here it’s waiting, waiting for the day in the future he might see his parents again (if they deserve to be here or some other place, but he’s not the judge of that) and for things to change and for Tatsuya to trust him. And he already trusts Tatsuya enough to wait for him, enough to decide that it’s probably worth it, to let his patience stretch thinner than it ever did when he was alive. He gives Tatsuya a half-smile and reaches for his hand; Tatsuya lets him hold it until he needs to switch gears again.

**Author's Note:**

> for @furufish: nijihimu + hell + roadtrip


End file.
